Matt Pearce is a contributing writer for The Los Angeles Times, The New Inquiry, and The Pitch. He’s based in Kansas City and recently covered the Egyptian elections and uprisings on Tahrir Square. ••• 1. Paul Ford – “The Epiphanator” – New York magazine I think this year we’ve reached this saturation point where a […]
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Joe Spring is the online editor for Outside Magazine. This was a big year for longform journalism. Byliner came out with blockbuster stories, like Jon Krakuer’s Three Cups of Deceit. The Atavist put out consistently strong features with solid multimedia. At Outside, our editors and writers contributed excellent investigative online exclusives (“Blood in the Water,” “Crashing Down”). Thanks […]
Nicholas Thompson is a senior editor at The New Yorker and a frequent Longreader. ** I’m a sucker for stories about reinvention, disappearence, and people who pretend to be someone they aren’t. The genre has cliches, and can become trite. But it can also be wonderful. And this year, the category brought us some wonderful […]
A lot of the more prominent evangelists these days seem more like motivational speakers. Some of the more popular—the Joel Osteens of the world—hardly mention Jesus until the end of their sermons, and many never mention Hell. But Jeffress believes that End Times are coming, and that there will be a reckoning for all eternity. […]
: Thomas Mucha, GlobalPost: My top 5 longreads of 2011 globalpost: Thomas Mucha is the editor at GlobalPost Dan Chiasson, The New York Review of Books High on the Stones Any writer who can connect Henry David Thoreau, Benjamin Franklin and Keith Richards in the same sentence is definitely worth reading.
doddcasting: My Top Five #Greenreads of 2011 scottdodd: This list is in no particular order. I also included a selection in OnEarth magazine’s best-of-the-year roundup, so technically, I’ve got six favorites. Find Top 5 Greenreads from other OnEarth contributors here, and share your own on Twitter and Tumblr with the hashtag #greenreads….
Elmo Keep is a writer who has written for The Hairpin, and other places. ••• The Tetris Effect — Justin Wolfe, The Awl There really isn’t a way to talk about this without spoiling the reveals. Just read it, whether you understand gaming or not, it doesn’t matter: If you don’t, you will come away […]
Dead Presidents: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011 deadpresidents: I’m a big fan of Longreads and I figured I’m important enough to share my Top 5 Longreads of 2011. Now, as much as I would love to include my own work in the Top 5, I am not going to rank articles of mine such […]
Radhika Jones is executive editor of Time. I got to work on a number of great longreads at Time this year, among them Lev Grossman on fan fiction, Kate Pickert on the perils of cancer screening, and Kurt Andersen on the Year of the Protester. But these are a few of the pieces from other […]
It’s a Facebook game called Cow Clicker, and it’s unlike anything Bogost ever made before, a borderline-evil piece of work that was intended to embody the worst aspects of the modern gaming industry. He meant Cow Clicker to be a satire with a short shelf life. Instead, it enslaved him and many of its players […]
Ben Williams is the online editorial director at New York Magazine. ••• 1. Celebrity profiles are the hardest genre to make fresh. So props to GQ for doing it not once but three times, with Jessica Pressler on Channing Tatum, Edith Zimmerman on Chris Evans, and Will Leitch on Michael Vick. With Pressler and Zimmerman, […]
Brendan Maher is biology features editor for the news team at Nature, the UK-based science journal. *** My selection of the best science-themed longreads for 2011 suffers from two major limitations: 1.) I couldn’t read everything, so have probably missed some very worthy entries. 2.) I purposely did not include articles from Nature, where I […]
Stiff Jab: Stiff Jab’s Top Five Boxing Longreads of 2011 stiffjab: by Gautham Nagesh 1. ”$50 UNDER 11.5 ROUNDS FLOYD MAYWEATHER, JR. VS. VICTOR ORTIZ.” by David Hill, McSweeney’s A beautifully wrought essay that relates Mayweather’s controversial stoppage of Ortiz in September while pondering the nature of fear and the impact of fatherhood. Hill…
Samuel Rubenfeld’s Tumblr: My top-5 Long Reads of 2011 rubenfeld: Here are what I considered to be the top five long-form, investigative journalism pieces of 2011. Beirut Bank Seen as a Hub of Hezbollah’s Financing — New York Times With CIA help, NYPD moves covertly in Muslim areas — Associated Press The Afghan Bank Heist […]
The city’s reaction to the fire, the most lethal in 30 years, was fierce. Many residents had grown tired of these tattooed and pierced panhandlers. In the days after the fire, there were calls to enforce vagrancy laws more strictly and bulldoze the squats. Yet the conditions in the crime-infested streets of the Ninth Ward […]
A. N. Devers‘ work has appeared online in Lapham’s Quarterly, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and in other publications. Her most recent essay, about poet Robinson Jeffers’ Tor House in Carmel, California, is in the Winter 2011 issue of Tin House. She is the founder and editor of Writers’ Houses, a website dedicated to literary pilgrimage. *** Maghag […]
Sheelah Kolhatkar is features editor at Bloomberg Businessweek. *** Some of my favorite non-Businessweek features that were published this year: “Lost at Sea,” Jon Ronson, The Guardian This piece combines a genre I love—the gritty crime story—with the utter weirdness of the cruise ship industry. Apparently people disappear from cruise ships all the time, but […]
Jeremy P. Bushnell is the editor-in-chief of Instafiction.org, which links to a quality short story each weekday. He stockpiles many other links at his blog, Raccoon. He’s also on Twitter. *** “Backbone,” David Foster Wallace (The New Yorker) During his lifetime, David Foster Wallace made massive contributions to the worlds of fiction and nonfiction alike, […]
From the beginning, their physical relationship was governed by the peculiar ways their respective brains processed sensory messages. Like many people with autism, each had uncomfortable sensitivities to types of touch or texture, and they came in different combinations. Jack recoiled when Kirsten tried to give him a back massage, pushing deeply with her palms. […]
Edith Zimmerman is a writer and co-editor of The Hairpin. *** “All the Single Ladies,” Kate Bolick, The Atlantic Kate’s story on the current state of marriage, and men, and women, is sad and happy and fascinating, and just generally makes me want to give her a high-five and roll cigarettes with her, even though […]
Gangrey.com is a site dedicated to the practice of great newspaper and magazine storytelling. Some of these picks make it seem like we like each other. We do, most of the time. But we’re also intense critics. We get together in the woods in Georgia one weekend each year to tear one another apart. Physical […]
[Three-part travelogue on Muay Thai boxing camp.] In January of 2010, Neil Chamberlain left Brooklyn for a three-month tour of Muay Thai boxing camps in Thailand. While abroad he kept an online chronicle of his experiences that was followed voraciously by his family and friends. Neil returned from Thailand in early April; less than two […]
Mike Dang is editor of Bundle and managing editor for Longreads. See his longreads page here. *** I’ve read a lot of great longreads this year, but I know that a longread is truly special when I become its biggest cheerleader. I’ll casually slip the story into conversations, teasing out some of its best bits […]
Jared Keller: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011 jaredbkeller: The Blind Man Who Taught Himself To See (Mens Journal, March 2011) Daniel Kish has been sightless since he was a year old. Yet he can mountain bike. And navigate the wilderness alone. And recognize a building as far away as 1,000 feet. How? The same […]
Karolina Waclawiak is a novelist and screenwriter. She is also the deputy editor of The Believer. Her first novel, How To Get Into The Twin Palms, will be out July 2012 from Two Dollar Radio. *** I’ve always been fascinated with religion, Russia, and missing persons stories so these five nonfiction pieces really captured my […]
Lightning Rods is about a salesman named Joe who fails to sell a single Encyclopedia Britannica and sells exactly one Electrolux vacuum cleaner. He realizes the problem isn’t with him. The problem is with other people. He needs to sell “something people knew they needed anyway.” He sets up a business of contracted female administrative […]
clampants tumblepants: My Top Longreads of 2011 (Non-fiction) clampants: In this, my first full year with Instapaper, I found that…I still don’t have the time to read that much. That said, I did read a little bit here and there, so here are my top longreads I read in 2011 (in no order…and none are […]
Jay Caspian Kang (pictured above) is an editor at Grantland. His work has also appeared in the New York Times Magazine and The Morning News. His first novel, The Dead Do Not Improve, will be published by Hogarth/Random House in August 2012. *** David Hill: “$100 Hand of Blackjack, Foxwoods Casino” (McSweeney’s) This is the […]
Zach Crizer: My top longreads of 2011 zachcrizer: Among all the great longform journalism published in 2011, these were my favorites: 1. A Murder Foretold, by David Grann, The New Yorker: Could have been a fantastic detective book — if it weren’t all true. The package of amazing reporting and brilliant storytelling makes this the […]
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